Dark clouds are hovering over Facebook, and their stocks are falling. Now, various American and European federal bodies have started asking how a voter-profiling company managed to get hold of the data of 50 million users.
Per a press release on Tuesday, the state of New York has followed the footsteps of Massachusetts that announced an investigation last weekend. As a part of a joint investigation, they have sent a demand letter to Facebook “to get to the bottom of what happened.”
New Jersey is another American state to trigger an investigation over the Facebook data breach. “I am particularly troubled by reports that Facebook may have allowed Cambridge to harvest and monetize its users’ private data, despite Facebook’s promises to keep that information secure,” said the attorney general Gurbir S. Grewal.
A Bloomberg report suggests that Facebook’s data sharing with Cambridge Analytica may have violated the 2011 FTC consent decree. Its sources claim that FTC is probing whether Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to harvest data without users’ knowledge. If Facebook is found to have violated the decree, the company could be fined $40,000 per violation.
It’s not only in the US, but Facebook is also facing transatlantic pressure as well. The UK parliament wrote a request for oral evidence to Mark Zuckerberg and demanded a “senior Facebook executive” (Zuckerberg himself) to give “an accurate account of this catastrophic failure.” The European Parliament has also asked Zuckerberg to make an appearance.